Tips on how to keep track of the progress, status, and health of projects and innovation initiatives.
Note that the ITONICS Kanban Boards is available as Add-on only. Contact us at account_manager@itonics.de to trial the feature for free.
How do Boards help me?
The benefits of using Boards include the following:
- Keep track of project progress, status, and health and innovation initiatives.
- Use Boards with any type of Element, e.g., Project, Trend, Technology, Opportunity etc. and visualize workflows.
- Visualize different Elements according to their properties, e.g., phase or TRL to get an overview of your portfolio and the distribution of specific Elements.
- Drag & drop Elements to change the status or properties of projects, ideas, startups, and more.
- Segment your content using columns and add a dimension for structuring content using swimlanes.
- Get an overview or detailed views of your growth initiatives by using filtering options to view what fits your use case.
- Save specific Board views as presets to use later and share them with colleagues.
- Visually identify bottlenecks to reduce inefficiencies.
- Maintain project and team information, and project and health status.
- Monitor progress, respond to changes, and use Boards to report to management.
Tips and Tricks to use Boards
1. Decide what use case you will use your Board for.
Define an objective for your Board. You can use Boards for ideation, start-up relationship management, project portfolio management, R&D development, and more. Determining this will inform how you use columns and swimlanes to categorize information. Once you have set up your Board, you are able to scroll Boards vertically and horizontally.
2. Choose segmentation according to your use case.
Your Boards should reflect the objective of what you are trying to manage and/or monitor. Start simple - you can always add additional columns or swimlanes at a later stage, and with the Board configuration, you can change segmentation to what best works for you and your team.
Start by using columns that represent your workflow, project phase, project health status, or idea stage. Use swimlanes to define your information further and visualize related items—group information by task type, strategic goals, business unit or team, products, or innovation horizons. For columns and swimlanes you can see how many Elements are in the respective column or swimlane with the counts displayed.
3. Save your Board view as a preset.
Presets save time by allowing you to get back to specific views quickly and improves collaboration by sharing specific views easily with colleagues and management.
Once you have configured your Board view to reflect what you or a particular team are interested in, save your view to use later and share it with colleagues.
4. Use Element cards to improve collaboration and communication.
Project, Idea, Technology, Opportunity Element cards, and more provide one-click access to additional information about the respective Element. If you are missing attributes on your Elements that can be used on the Columns and Swimlanes of your Board, you can change that by either navigating to Element Configuration, and activating existing single-select list fields for your chosen Element Type. Or, if you are the Application Admin and have access to the Organization Element Configuration, you can create new fields via the Property Configuration. Once created, make them available on the selected Element Type in your Workspace.
Use the Comments function in Element cards when you open them up in the stack, to improve communication. Use the information in Element cards to increase collaboration by using collective Ratings. Attach additional information to the Element to increase participation, improve common understanding, and align decision-making.
5. Use Element relations and further content within the Element detail card to analyze your innovation portfolio
By connecting your portfolio management, idea stage coordination, emerging technologies, or product management activities to foresight, ideation, and execution phases within innovation, you increase productivity and enhance alignment across global teams. Use the Radar to discover opportunities and risks, Insights to monitor the evolution of drivers of change or discover new developments and market entrants, and use Roadmaps to steer the execution of your innovation projects and programs.
How to set up a Board
Click here to learn how to set up a Board with the ITONICS Innovation OS.